Grave New World

by S. P. Blackmore

  “Zombies,” Tony called. “Don’t give me that blank stare. We’ve all seen the movies.” He dumped several newer-looking rifles onto the front counter. “Dax, help me move these couches in front of the windows. I don’t know if any are in the area, but we need to fortify the place.”

  “Zombies,” Dax repeated. “Like, living dead people?”

  “Hell, maybe they’re just alive and rotting. They’re damned unattractive, whatever they are.” Tony ended up shoving the couches around on his own. “That’s what Hammond meant. All that crap from the impact sites. Bubonic plague! I thought small.” He threw a towel at me when he was done, and I managed to catch it. “Dammit, Dax, I said clean her up. Wash the dog, too. They’re both covered in dead man’s bits.”

  “You guys are fucking with me,” Dax said.

  “Clearly you didn’t see the undead motherfucker trying to make a meal out of Vibeke,” Tony snapped. “Now fucking get to it!”

  At that point, I think Dax was more upset by Tony than the prospect of the living dead, and he pulled me up the stairs to the second floor. “What the hell?” he whispered. “Dead people? Is he off his shit? You guys weren’t wearing your masks. Who knows what kind of radioactive particles you breathed—”

  “The dog was breathing it,” I mumbled. “I know she was…she’s okay….so I guess we are, too…”

  We stood in the second-floor restroom, and he pointed at the shower. “Is that brain in your hair?”

  I pushed him out of the bathroom. “Wash the dog.”

  Cold showers were never really my cup of tea, but I realized I didn’t really care about the lack of heat while trying to scrub a dead man’s scum off me. Blood, bone, hair, and bits and pieces of…stuff…dripped off me and swirled down the drain, and gooseflesh broke out along my skin.

  I scrubbed until my skin turned red, and then I scrubbed harder.

  Out, damned spot! His brains and skin had hit my face in an icy spray, and I smeared on another dollop of soap. My eyes stung almost as badly as they had outside.

  The door abruptly swung open, slamming against the wall. I shrieked and dropped the washcloth, fumbling around for a shower curtain we didn’t have.

  Tony glowered at me. “Vibby, darling, don’t pretty yourself up on our account.”

  I hunkered down by the drain, trying to cover myself. “Get out! And don’t call me Vibby!”

  “Then get moving.” The door slammed shut.

  I washed my face one more time, then turned off the water.

  I raided the Rock Weekly closet again, gathered up the clothes I’d worn to the supermarket, and dumped them into Clive’s trashcan. No amount of dry cleaning would ever get Tom’s brains out of my sweatshirt, or the scent of rotted flesh and food out of my jeans.

  Dax had washed the dog in my absence, and was still in the process of toweling her off. “Her tag says Evie,” he said, rubbing her ears. All her wet fur made her look pretty damned skinny; how long had she been out wandering?

  “Fitting,” I said. “Like ‘Eve of Destruction.’”

  He continued his methodical drying. “Did you really see…”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t answer me. Hell, what can you even say to that?

  The dog walked over to me, sat down, and wagged her tail.

  “What’s she want?” I asked. My family always had cats.

  “She wants you to pet her.”

  That was easy enough. I knelt down in front of the happy, smiling dog, then ran my hands through her damp coat. She couldn’t have been that young; her muzzle had gone gray, but she panted and grinned, and her tail thumped loudly against the floor when I scratched behind her ears.

  “Good Evie…good little harbinger of the endtimes…”

  Tony appeared in the doorway, still clad in the ash-covered outfit he’d worn to the supermarket. “She might be useful. She sure as hell doesn’t like the dead guys.” He paused as if he expected a response. When the two of us just looked at him, he shrugged and went on. “Garage is clear; I checked it and moved Bobby Rossum’s old clunker in front of the gate. But we need to fortify all the exits.”

  I kept petting the dog. “With what?”

  “We’ll take apart the staff tables on all three floors. They’ll do for covering the windows in the front office.”

  “There’s a back door that leads to the alley,” I said. “But I don’t think it even opens from outside.”

  “You didn’t think the dead would start walking around, either, did you? We barricade everything on the first floor.”

  I stood up, pleased that my legs weren’t shaking as they had in the shower. “Why not the second? What if the zombies fly?”

  “Then we’re fucked either way. We lock up the first floor, then we worry about the second. Now get up and help me.”

  ***

  Six rooms downstairs had windows facing outside, including the front office.

  We hacked the legs off the downstairs staff table and lugged it out of the tiny staff room and into the lobby. The table was flimsy at best; I failed to see how it would stand up to a kid with a toy lightsaber, much less a determined zombie, but I suspected Tony was just trying to keep us busy, rather than let us dwell on the fact that holy fuck, the dead were walking.

  We hammered the table and half of its second-floor compatriot around the windows. There was nothing we could do about the doors; we still needed to go in and out, and once we boarded up the alley exit, the front would be the only way. We compromised by piling the two couches atop each other.

  Attending to the windows in the other offices was harder. Tearing apart desks looks fun from a distance, but actually hammering off the legs, yanking out drawers, and prying the relatively sturdy top off the other parts kept us sweating and cursing for the better part of four hours.

  We shut off the lights and closed the office doors. That seemed to be all we could do.

  The dog followed us from room to room, wagging her tail when we looked her way and dozing while we worked. “We’re gonna need to get her some kibble,” I said, holding what remained of the art designer’s desk against the back door while Tony hammered in the railroad spikes he’d stolen from Clive’s desk.

  He was going to give them to us for Christmas, I wanted to say. He got them on his honeymoon in Virginia City and he said they were lucky. It seemed important that someone know what Clive had meant with those spikes, that he wasn’t just a creep keeping sharp objects in the bottom drawer of his desk.

  But Dax didn’t know Clive, and Tony would just tell me to quit being so damned sentimental.

  By the time we finished, the clock in the lobby said it was eight o’clock. Evie pawed at the front door and whined softly, and Tony immediately drew his pistol. “More of them?”

  Evie whined again, then looked at us rather pointedly.

  “She needs to go out,” Dax said.

  Tony frowned. “Can’t we teach her to use a toilet?”

  “You can try, but right now I suggest we let her go out.”

  We moved the couches aside, and Dax and Tony let the dog outside. I hovered in the doorway, trying to make out the shapes of the buildings and cars on the street. The occasional streetlight flickered on and off, and the Culver Building three doors down was still ablaze with light, but aside from that, a heavy veil had settled over Industrial Road.

  The dog did her business across the street, then came back. Tony pointed at the Culver Building. “We’re going to need to shut that down tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Dax asked.

  Even I knew the answer to this one. “Because it’ll attract people. Or things.”

  Tony nodded approvingly at me. “We can also raid their snack machines.”

  We levied the couches back in front of the doorway and set the alarm. It chimed reassuringly, and ALL ARMED flashed across the screen. If anything came through, we’d know.

  “Shutting off the lights was a good idea,” Tony said as he made us a dinner of spaghetti and
canned peas. “It’ll conserve energy.”

  “I thought the power came from the dam,” Dax said.

  “It does, but who knows what systems are still working? All those flickering lights suggests there’s an overload or an energy leak somewhere…or maybe our cabling just held up better.” He set paper plates down in front of us. I stared down at my meal, utterly unenthused. Dead men were walking around and Tony expected me to eat?

  “Water, anyone? I’ll get us all water. Evie, don’t eat so fast, you’ll give yourself a cramp.”

  She crunched loudly on something. I looked over. “Why’s she eating Cheerios?”

  Tony set water bottles in front of us. “It’s nutritious, isn’t it? We’ll get her some proper food tomorrow. Here, have some water.”

  He hadn’t stopped moving since shooting Tom.

  Then it hit me. Tony was freaked.

  My roommate had told me about some paper she’d written detailing the way people responded to stressful situations. “Some folks just shut down,” she’d said, and I supposed that had been my initial reaction. “Others get really hyper-efficient. It’s fascinating.”

  Tony’s scared, too. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse about the situation.

  I glanced at the television, but the EAS screen was still up. What’s Gloria going to say about all this?

  We ate quickly. Tony finished first, tossed his plate into the garbage, and paused to inspect the guns laid out on the table. “Hammond said to aim for the head.”

  “Did Hammond know?” I couldn’t imagine withholding that sort of crucial evidence from people trying to survive. Oh, by the way, the dead are walking around…aim for the head.

  “He knew something was wrong around the impact sites. Whether he knew the specifics…” Tony shrugged and picked up a pistol. “This will suit you, I think. But you both need a crash course with a rifle.”

  The peas crunched loudly between my teeth. Tony hadn’t defrosted them enough.

  Dax picked at his food. I wondered what psychological coping profile Lucy would have assigned him.

  The TV hiccupped, and for a moment I thought Gloria or some other reporter was about to update us on the already grim situation. Instead, a message popped up, taking the place of the EAS background and imparting a message to anyone left watching: Those within a five-mile radius of blast sites are becoming violent. Keep your distance at all times.

  Tony dragged us down into the parking garage and quickly set up two targets. He pressed pistols into our hands—at least, I think they were pistols; they were handguns, anyway. “These are good starter guns,” he said. I examined my Remington. “I put silencers on both of them. Don’t need anyone to come wandering in after hearing them go off.”

  He pointed at two targets set up at the other end of the garage. “Aim at those. They both have a kick, so hold them tight to keep them from jumping around. Keep your legs shoulder-width apart—move your left foot forward, Dax, good. Just clench it…no, Vibby, like…I don’t know, pretend you’re throttling me.”

  I tightened my fingers until my hand shook a little.

  “Good! Now, just aim at the target, and—”

  I left some nice-sized chinks in the cement walls before finally making a dent (or more) in the targets. The silencers didn’t actually silence anything; they muted the gunshot, but it still produced a distinct thunk as the weapon discharged.

  Tony stopped us after I hit the target three times and Dax had made a mess. “You said you did shooting in the Scouts.”

  “Yeah, I have a badge in archery.” Dax held out the pistol like it was a decaying rodent. “And I can handle a hunting rifle.”

  Tony glared at both of us. “How is it Vibby is good with firearms?”

  “I have a lot of pent-up rage. And don’t call me Vibby.” I turned the gun over a couple of times. “Where’d you get these, anyway?” I tried to examine the silencer like I knew what I was looking at. “I thought Restoration was aimed at…fixing old guns.”

  He snatched the pistol from me and clicked the safety back on. “Silencers aren’t that hard to make. You can manufacture them pretty easily if you have the know-how. There’s a nice market for them in Astra, too.”

  Dax and I exchanged glances. “You were…selling them?” Dax asked.

  “Why do you think the Ventras left our building alone? Besides, you ever try to live off a journalist’s salary?” Off he went, fingers tapping the barrel of his Smith & Wesson.

  Dax looked at me.

  “I thought that was maybe just…luck…”

  “Yeah. Luck.”

  In the end, I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: the fact that I handled a gun well, or the fact that Tony and his pals had run a silencer lab less than twelve feet over my head.

  FIVE

  Tony made each of us take a loaded rifle and a pistol before we opened the front door. The holster strapped around my thigh was a constant awkward presence, and the rifle bumped against my back with every step I took. I was pretty sure any dead people would hear us clinking and clanking our way down the street.

  The Culver Building housed doctors and dentists—at least, it did before the world ended. They shut down at five o’clock sharp, and any patients were diverted to the urgent care clinic in South Harkin.

  “Who’s going to come inside with me?” Tony asked us as he inspected the lock on the front door.

  Dax and I pointed at each other.

  Tony rolled his eyes. “Vibs, you watch the door. Anything comes at us, shoot it or club it.”

  Wait. I had to guard the front door while they riffled through four floors of medical devices? “But—”

  He shot the locks off the door and strode in, the building’s alarm system screeching behind him.

  Well, that was one way to make an entrance. Dax sent me an apologetic look and followed, leaving me standing outside with two guns I could barely use and a whole post-apocalyptic world full of scary shit.

  At least I had the dog.

  I thought about crying. Just a couple of tears to release some of the awful pressure that had built up in my head since the bathroom first started shaking a week ago. The alarm made it worse; I wanted to cover my ears, but if I did that, I’d end up dislodging the rifle, and God knew what Tony would do to me if I dented his precious lever-action Winchester. So I leaned against the outside wall and listened to them shouting to each other over the alarm—that stupid, stupid alarm. Was anyone even listening anymore?

  “Got it,” Dax called, and after another minute the alarm mercifully ceased. Maybe the Culver receptionist taped the code to the underside of her desk like ours had.

  Their voices retreated into the building, and then it was just me and the silent earth.

  Evie growled softly.

  The figure came shambling out of the ash so slowly I initially thought it was just air. It gradually solidified into legs, a torso, and slack arms, and I wrapped my right hand around the pistol.

  Evie snapped her teeth and kept growling. I reached down with my left hand to grab her collar. “Quiet,” I whispered. “Don’t let it know we’re here.”

  I still don’t know how they see, but the damned thing paused in its tracks, and the hair on the back of my neck rose—the same feeling I got when some creeper was staring me down at a bar. The figure started moving again with renewed vigor, though that’s not saying much. Dead men can only move so fast.

  I tugged out the pistol and glanced into the Culver Building. “Tony?” I whispered, but he was long gone. “Goddammit, Tony…”

  I aimed the pistol, but I knew damn well I wasn’t about to hit anything from so far away. “Come here, you undead fuck,” I muttered, my palm sweating against the grip. I needed to let go of the dog, but I was afraid she’d attack the damned thing and wind up poisoned.

  The smell hit me first. Think of a steak left out to rot for a week. That might give you the shell of the scent of human decay, but human bodies are full of stuff—not just mea
t. Fluid and gasses and goop, all of it rotting away while this poor bastard shuffled toward me.

  One of his eyes had fallen out of its socket and lolled against his face with each step. His skin, while mostly intact, stretched taut over his bones, and something had chewed on his left hand and half the Lakers sweatshirt that covered it.

  Lakers sweatshirt?

  Oh, hell.

  He came closer.

  Maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he’s just badly injured and needs help and we left him for dead yesterday. Maybe…

  He got close enough for me to see the missing chunks of flesh in his throat. Something had gotten ahold of him after he ran off. Maybe several somethings.

  Dead, dead, dead. This was the end of the world, not Vibeke Catches a Break.

  I let go of the dog. “Stay,” I told her sternly, and she whined again. “Sit your ass down and stay.”

  She sat. I whispered a thank-you to her previous owner.

  Then I fired.

  The bullet landed somewhere in the ash bed over the pavement. “Fuck,” I muttered, and squinted at the dead man. Aim for the head. Aim for the head. Right, that’s easy if you’re James Bond or Rambo.

  He came closer, mouth falling open.

  The moan rattled through what remained of his larynx and made me want to turn around and hide. The dog forgot that I'd ordered her to stay and hurled herself at the dead man. “Evie!” Too late, I realized I shouldn’t have called out. Goddammit, get back here!

  She went for his legs. The ghoul swatted at her with a motion that seemed almost human—until he moaned again, and something in me kicked into overdrive. I clutched the pistol and started toward him.

  Evie flung herself at the man, barking a mile a minute. The zombie went down, and then I was standing over him, staring into one whitened, wizened eye while his hands stretched feebly toward me. Evie stood on his chest barking into his face, and something inside him creaked.

  He snapped at me hard enough to break two of his teeth. Damn, that couldn’t feel good when they bit down.

  “You don’t look that scary,” I told him. “You’re kind of pathetic, actually. You got taken down by a golden retriever, dude.”